Bulgaria became Monday the first nation to request the registration of an Internet domain in Cyrillic.

Bulgaria's representative at the Governmental Advisory Committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has delivered a letter on behalf of the Chair of the State Agency for Information Technologies and Communications Plamen Vachkov to the ICANN President Paul Towmey in Paris requesting the right to register a domain in Cyrillic.

In submitting their letter, the Bulgarian authorities took advantage of the fact that the delegates at the ICANN Conference currently taking place in Paris are expected to make a decision for the setting up of multi-lingual first level domains.

ICANN manages the domains .com, .net, .info, and .org among others. Bulgaria is requesting to register and maintain domain .Ð±Ð³, which is likely the country's present code .bg but in Cyrillic.

The move is actively supported by the Bulgarian Uninet Association, which is working to promote the use of the Cyrillic alphabet on the net.

In fact I am of the opinion that it proves to give good cultural arguments for the need to switch to IRIs now and some very cogent technical reasons why we must. (Михал Орела 14:04, 30 June 2008 (UTC))

While URIs are limited to a subset of the ASCII character set, IRIs may contain characters from the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646), including Chinese or Japanese kanji, Korean, Cyrillic characters, and so forth. Many internet protocols such as HTTP and DNS use URIs or portions of them but publication languages such as AtomPub and RDF use IRIs to identify web resoruces. RFC3987 defines a mapping from IRIs to URIs, allowing, for example, IRIs to be dereferenced on the [World Wide Web]. The IRI

There are reasons to see URIs displayed in different languages; mostly, it makes it easier for users who are unfamiliar with the Latin (A-Z) alphabet. Assuming that it isn't too difficult for anyone to replicate arbitrary Unicode on their keyboards, this can make the URI system more worldly and accessible.

Mixing IRIs and ASCIIURIs can make it much easier to do phishing attacks that trick someone into believing they are on a site they really are not on. For example, one can replace the "a" in www.ebay.com or www.paypal.com with an internationalized look-alike "a" character, and point that IRI to a malicious site. This is known as an IDN homograph attack.

While a URI does not provide people with a way to specify Web resources using their own alphabets, an IRI does not make clear how Web resources can be accessed with keyboards that are not capable of generating the requisite internationalized characters.